Fear the Night

25

1990

Dante Vanya lost his youth in a matter of months. The city saw to that.

Now people looked away from him or through him as he plodded wearily toward the Thirty-third Street subway stop, wearing the ragged clothes he’d stolen or scrounged from curbside trash. He was like all the others now, he thought. What the people he passed saw, if they saw him at all, was simply another lost and damaged human being who could never be fixed. One of a defeated and hopeless army.

They wouldn’t notice Dante was younger than most. His face was dirty, his hair lank and unshorn, his eyes old and hopeless. He was simply another of the city’s sick and despondent , lost and waiting for their time somehow to expire. In Dante’s dismal world everyone was the same age, calculated not from the beginning of life, but from the much more imminent end.

Over the past nine months, since he’d fled terrified from the apartment of his dead mother and his doomed father, Dante learned how to panhandle, then to steal. Then he’d resorted to making money selling sexual services, mostly to male clients. Now his health and appearance had declined so even that was impossible. He knew that if people looked directly at him, he in some way frightened them even through their superiority and disdain. Most of those he implored to help him usually decided not to part with their change as they hurried past.

Dante had been abused and humiliated in every way possible. What was left of him was rock-bottom tough and cynical, and he knew with fierce certainty that his father had been right about this city and the people in it.

In the winter, he’d learned to live underground, in subway tunnels that were abandoned or under construction. There was a dark, rat-and-roach infested city beneath Manhattan, where people kept to themselves as much as possible, preferring their own pain to the dangers of association. Strength was respected there, and privacy was defended. There was little sharing, because no one had anything to share. If crowding was inevitable, which happened if the weather above was severe, it was wise not to sleep. This was especially true on cold winter nights. In the dark shelters belowground, death was always near and not at all selective. Everyone was there for one reason: it was preferable to freezing to death aboveground.

But tonight was warm. And still cloudless. Dante was probably one of the few homeless who happened to have heard the weather report was changed and thunder showers were now in the forecast. The abandoned subway stop might be crowded later tonight, but for a while there should be plenty of space.

When he lifted the two loose boards that allowed entry into the abandoned subway stop, there were only a few other dim figures in the darkness.

He edged around frozen turnstiles and made his way down a still escalator to the platform and tracks. The closest other homeless person to Dante was at least a hundred feet away.

Dante went to the base of the concrete steps leading down to the platform. He’d been here before and knew there was space beneath the steps, where it would be shadowed and darker, more private than simply lying down near one of the steel supporting posts.

He squatted low and stared into the darkness beneath the stairs, making sure the space wasn’t already occupied. Nothing visible. No movement. No sounds of stirring or breathing.

With a quick glance around, he scooted into the narrow space beneath the steps. There was a strong smell of urine there, but it at least overwhelmed the faint odor of rot that might have been something dead.

Dante struggled out of the threadbare jacket he’d been wearing despite the heat-it was always safer to wear what you intended to keep than to carry it-and laid it out on the hard concrete.

His hand brushed something and he jerked it back. Then he reached out cautiously and felt the object.

This was good. Among the trash that littered the floor was an approximately two-foot-square sheet of plastic bubble pack. The bubbles had all been crushed in one corner, but the rest still trapped air and, if the sheet were folded, it would provide a makeshift pillow.

Dante curled on his side on the jacket. He folded the bubble pack in half, then in quarters, and worked it beneath his head.

Soft. Almost like a real pillow.

He settled in and exhaled loudly. This was the first time he’d had a chance to rest since morning, when the cops patrolling the park at dawn failed to notice him. Someone coughed, but the sound came from far away down the tunnel. Dante pressed his legs together and folded his arms, then closed his eyes and lay listening. It was a long time before he fell asleep.

Two hours later Dante awoke from the horrors of his dreams, choking, struggling to breathe, in terrible pain. Around him was light. Dancing shadow.

Fire!

The litter and debris on the tunnel floor was on fire!

So was the plastic bubble pack he was using as a pillow!

Fire!

Pain was his world. Pain and panic.

There was no thought, no plan, only terror and instinct. Dante sprang to his feet, banging his head on the underside of the concrete steps, spun screaming until he had his direction, and ran. There were screams other than his own, other cries for help, but he didn’t hear them or even his own shrill screams as he fled to street level, the smoldering, melted plastic clinging to his face like a ferocious, chewing beast that would never let go.

In a way, it never did let go.

Dante learned weeks later that faulty wiring had caused the fire, and that electrical service to the abandoned subway stop should have been shut down months before.

The city’s mistake, and Dante’s bad luck for trespassing.

The city’s mistake.